Bachmann exit helps GOP scrub stupid away

(CNN) — Remember when Sarah Palin was the face of the Republican Party?

It only seems like yesterday she was the Republicans’ most talked-about candidate for president. Now she’s gone from prominent voice on Fox News to a reality TV star whose latest project is a book entitled “A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas.”

That’s almost as good a book title as Christine O’Donnell’s “Troublemaker: Let’s Do What It Takes To Make America Great Again” and way better than the snoozer Sharron Angle is pushing: “Right Angle: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim the Constitution.”

Immigration reform may be the aspect of the GOP rebranding strategy that gets the most headlines, but heeding Gov. Bobby Jindal’s call to “stop being the stupid party” also appears to be high on the party’s list.

Hence the marginalizing of Palin and the rest of the party’s Sisterhood of the Traveling Rants. In 2010, the sisterhood was everywhere, speaking in front of big crowds, making stuff up as they went along. Now they’re at the kids’ table, trying to make room for one more: Michele Bachmann.

“I fully anticipate the mainstream liberal media to put a detrimental spin on my decision not to seek a fifth term,” Bachmann said in a nearly nine-minute video in which she announced that she is not seeking re-election.

In another example of what has become the norm for conservatives who become annoyed by facts, Bachmann pointed a finger at the so-called mainstream liberal media and not at her former national field coordinator, Peter Waldron, who filed an ethics complaint.

She’s accusing the media of spin instead of owning up to the fact that House Republicans have quietly shunned her or that her well-documented penchant for massaging the truth has drawn criticism from conservatives such as Bill O’Reilly.

In April 2009, while arguing against climate change on the House floor, Bachmann said, “there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

In 2011, in regards to HPV vaccination, she said a mother told “me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. It can have very dangerous side effects.”

This year, she gave a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conerence, slinging hunks of red-meat untruths about President Obama, and when she was questioned about the facts of her speech by CNN’s Dana Bash, she ran away.